We study transactions that require investments before trading in a competitive market, when forward contracts fixing the transaction price are absent. We show that, despite the market being perfectly competitive and subject to arbitrarily little uncertainty, the inability to jointly determine...

Consider two agents who learn the value of an unknown parameter by observing a sequence of private signals. The signals are independent and identically distributed across time but not necessarily agents. Does it follow that the agents will commonly learn its value, i.e., that the true value of...

We examine the evolutionary foundations of intertemporal preferences. When all the risk affecting survival and reproduction is idiosyncratic, evolution selects for agents who maximize the discounted sum of expected utility, discounting at the sum of the population growth rate and the mortality...